paul williams

not the annoying composer of cloying pop tripe but rather the ex-sci-fi geek who, as editor of crawdaddy! mag back in the '60s, pert near singlehandedly 'riginated the rockwrite genre, for good (he pubbed the earliest writings of peter guralnick and richard meltzer) or evil (ditto jon landau). when i first stumbled on him as a snotnose back in '70 or so (a thin volume called outlaw blues drawn from his crawdaddy! output), i didn't revere williams' "i'm-a-fan-and-this-is-how-i-respond-to-the-music" style as much as nic (rock from the beginning) cohn's hip-shooting wiseassismo or saint lester bangs' epic rants, but in the fullness of time, it's worn a lot better than lotsa other stuff, and he held onto his sense of wonder well into the '80s (the map) and '90s (back to the miracle factory). i recently found a copy of the crawdaddy! book, a large-format, williams-edited anthology of pieces from the mag's '66-'69 heyday, and it's been a gas to revisit the ones i'd read previously 'n' discover the ones i hadn't. besides the writing, which is a far cry from the ad copy or mental masturbation that passes for "rock criticism" in the now, there's the subject matter, which is eclectic 'n' varied enough to make me nostalgic for a time before reductionist marketeers and media wonks divided 'n' conquered the audience to the point where every imaginable demographic segment has its own genre of music, magazine, radio / tv station, uniform, etc., and absolutely no tolerance for anybody else's schitt.